Summer Reading, Future Reading

Next week is the start of classes here at Virginia Tech. I’m sitting by the open screen door with a cup of hot tea and wearing a long sleeved shirt because the easy breeze blowing through our yard has the first cool hints of the turning season. The crickets are chirping in the underbrush, and apples were fresh at the farmer’s market this morning. It almost feels like Fall, and I am ready to begin my new work, but also I am not.

Soon, I will meet my English education students for the first time.  We will be reading and writing and learning together. I will be asking them to blog, too, and their first post due is the topic “Summer Reading, Future Reading.” Because I read and write with my students, their blog topics for class will be mine here, as well. And reflecting on the reading I have done this summer seems a good transition into my new role in this new place.

This is the first summer in several years that I have been given the time for pleasure reading. Having just finished four years of graduate school, I have spent the better part of my summers reading books related to work and study. The summer I was writing my comprehensive exams, I read 60 books—all related in some way to my evolving dissertation proposal. Last summer I was beginning the research work of my study, so again, my reading was related to that, when I had time to read.

But this summer, with my dissertation defended and submitted at the beginning of May, I was allowed the freedom to read in ways I have not in years. First, I read books that were related to what I had been reading—habits die hard, I guess. I found myself engrossed in David Abram’s phenomenological work Becoming Animal, which was beautiful. I devoured Being Caribou, a non-fiction account of a couple who follow the annual caribou migration from Canada to Alaska. It was fascinating. Then, I read a book on mindfulness given to me by a former student. I was working on some publications and conference proposals, so, I would read a book, take a short break, and work on something else until I found another book.

But then, something happened. I discovered that one of the public libraries at which I hold an account allows patrons to “borrow” e-books, and the bottom dropped out. After that day, I carried my iPad everywhere, ate with it on the table during meals. I knew Brian might have been terrified if he had woken to find me reading at 4:00AM, face illuminated as if by a campfire horror story flashlight trick, but I did it anyway. I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I read a Jonathan Safran Foer novel. And then—on a recommendation—I downloaded the first book of A Song of Ice and Fire series, otherwise known as A Game of Thrones. I was lost.

Have you ever wanted so badly to finish a book—not to get to the end—but, instead, to get your life back? So stands my romance with George R. R. Martin and his smutty, schlocky fantasy series. For weeks, obsessed, I did little else besides lose myself in the drama of battles, romance, incest, wildings, others, lions, direwolves, dragons. I doing so, I became again the little girl I was, curled under the sheets with a flashlight, engrossed in Madeline L’Engle or Ursula LeGuin, reading all night, reading all day, even while my mother yelled at me to go outside and play. I read all four of the first Ice and Fire books without a break between, discovered there was a fifth, and then I read it too.

I had forgotten what it was like to be able to totally leave myself behind, so deeply engaged in a text that the world fades away. As a child, I loved that feeling, but now it is a little unsettling. After five books worth, I found myself missing me, even as much as I (ashamedly) loved the story and saw pieces of myself reflected in the characters.

Now, with a few days left before the start of the semester, I have real reading to do—pedagogy, YAL, and more related to my research. And, perhaps more importantly, I have myself and my world toward which to turn. Frankly, I feel I need a break from summer reading. The sixth Ice and Fire book is not out yet, and that is a good thing. I am not even going to look for it until next summer. 

Home, not Home

One day in July I arrived on Tech’s campus for a meeting and to submit some paperwork. I opened my car door, looked across the street, and immediately recognized a former student, John, who asked, astonished, “What are YOU doing here?” We held a brief reunion, discussed my new job, his new degree and future plans, and wished each other well. A familiar face tempered my anxiety, and I felt almost at home. The first weekend in August, I moved into our small house, and, since then, I have been exploring, seeking a feeling for people and place.

Farmer's Market Findings

This past weekend was my first one here in Blacksburg. I am alone until the end of the month and trying to find a sense of home in this new place and space—as a person and as a teacher, too. On Saturday morning, I visited the bi-weekly farmer’s market, which, astonishingly, is bigger than the one where I lived in Berkeley Springs.  All the vegetables, fruits, baked goods, meat, eggs, and other products there are produced within a 50 mile radius of Blacksburg, so the market truly offers a sense of what is local, what it means to be here. I walked around, talked to vendors and organizers, sampled some apples, and purchased much of my food for the week.

I almost felt at home. The locals here speak an Appalachian twang similar to but also different from the dialect I know—like the difference between the Ginger Gold and the Johnathan apples I sampled at the market this morning. Both are sweet, both familiar, but different in texture, tone, and tartness. The conversations I had echoed of home, and of the market I remember. I bought a bunch of rainbow chard, and the vendor gave me a second one for free; “Grab two,” she said, sweeping her braid behind her shoulder, “we have a lot this week.” I thought of Rachel, my former student, who works on her family farm and always saved apples aside for me in the Fall; Honeycrisp, my favorite, always sold quickly at the farmer’s market in the Springs.

On Sunday, I found trails to run at Pandapas Pond. These trails are more populated than those I ran in and around Morgan County, but they’re muddy and forested and full of twists, rocks, and roots. My legs strained against the sharp turns and steep climbs, and, in a way, moving through the woods in Jefferson National Forest felt like home. I looped around the pond, watched by grumbling geese, then worked my way up the hills and back down, an hour sweating in the trails. I remembered the bear who frequently I saw at Cacapon State Park when I ran trails there, the way I would glimpse his fat rear crashing away through the brush as I rounded a bend. I recalled the ladyslipper orchids that cover one stretch of trails there in the spring. I hope to find the same sense of wonder here that made me feel so at home in Morgan County. And these experiences are signs, it seems, that I will.

Yet still, I feel slightly out of place—I am exploring place and program, trying to understand what it means to be here now and what my role will be professionally. In shaping my new life here, I am also shaping my teacherly self, settling into a sense of home that I hope will spiral out to my classroom practice. Brooke (2003) writes that “rich” learning is “tied to and flow[s] from local culture, “ since “Local communities, regions, and histories are the places where we shape our individual lives...” (p. 4). In seeking my own sense of place (physical, personal, and professional) connected to this new space, I am working to conceptualize myself as a learner and teacher at home (not yet home), here, in Blacksburg. This ripples out from me and toward learning implications for my students, who come from here, and also for the students whom they will teach. I hope my classroom will come to feel like home, welcoming my students who also welcome me, reading and writing together, creating a sense of place, shaped by the lived space and community in which we learn.  And so, I head out again today—to explore, to play, to work, and to learn, in search of home.

Reference

Brooke, R. (2003). Introduction: Place-conscious education, rural schools, and the Nebraska writing project's rural voice, country schools team. In R. Brooke (Ed.), Rural voices: Place-conscious education and the teaching of writing (pp. 1-20). New York, NY: Teachers College Press. 

Arise, Writer: Beginning Again

It has been five years (five!) since I last posted here. In that time, I have undergone turbulence and transformation, heartbreak and healing. It’s been a long five years, and also too short.

This morning, in the midst of unpacking from my most recent move, I found myself digging though the relics of my past. It’s been five years since I had an office or classroom space, so this move to Blacksburg, Virginia has uncovered a mother lode of dusty boxes and plastic bins that have been in storage in my parents’ garage since I left my classroom at the end of the 2008-2009 school year to attend graduate school. Among the artifacts of my public school teacher past are tons of books, archived student works, miscellaneous gifts and tchotchkes, photographs, toys, tools, and other things. 

One box, in particular, held items significant to my sense of teacherly self (and to this blog, as well): all the paraphernalia that come along with being perceived as a talented teacher. There is the clock in the shape of West Virginia that was given to me when I spoke at a Mineral County Schools banquet. It needs a new battery but is now hanging above the kitchen sink regardless. Plaques and certificates line the sides of the box—Morgan County New Teacher Award, Morgan County Teacher of the Year, National Board Certified teacher, Japan Fulbright Memorial Teacher. In the bottom of the box is a pair of bent coat-hanger antlers affixed to a wooden base inscribed “Amazing Ms. Moose,” a token from an AP English class years ago. And nested amid wadded and yellowed paper wrapping is an obelisk given to me on the day I was named Teacher of the Year for the state of West Virginia. Looking through these things, I remember that I was a good teacher. I left a job that I loved so that I could grow, but I cried uncontrollably on the day that I packed up my classroom. The summer between leaving Berkeley Springs High School and beginning at The University of Maryland was a tenuous transition, a time of uncertainty—starting from scratch.

My life has been full of startings these last five years. Since I last posted, I have moved five times, losing and gaining loves and friendships along the way. Don’t think I haven’t been writing, though: I return to this blog as a PhD. So between this post and my last post I have written a gazillion papers, as well as a dissertation, all 350+ pages of it, scratched out, revised, and defended, finally. As my dad says, it’s “kind of like a book,” and it’s also like a piece of me that I can’t get back; it’s finished, and I miss it. The day it was complete and submitted in finality, I cried uncontrollably. There is a kind of sadness that sets in when we finish something meaningful, a post-partum ache. Again, I’ve left something I loved in order to grow.

So now I am once more starting from scratch. I have accepted a job at Virginia Tech in teaching and learning. I am the program leader for English education, a visiting assistant professor. It is a time of transition, of mourning the end of my doctoral work and moving on to professorial aspirations. I’m both excited and also frightened by the uncertainty of a new job, a new place. Now, as I transition out of my dissertating, which I loved, I feel the same kind of tenuous uncertainty I felt when I left Morgan County and West Virginia. Like I missed my high school students and colleagues, I miss my dissertation and my peers, professors, and friends at the University of Maryland. I’m eager to begin again, to keep growing, but I am afraid, too. What if I fail? What if I am no longer the good teacher who earned an obelisk or a moose shaped sculpture? What if the hard work of the last four years have been for nothing? Where will these first steps take me? I have no choice but to move forward, so forward I go. 

Life is an ever-expanding spiral of knowing and not knowing, of rising and falling, climbing to descend and begin again. This is the most profound lesson of my life each time it happens, and it doesn’t make the learning any easier—the lesson is raw every time. Perhaps writing can help dissuade that sense of loss. So here I am, starting again, a novice, a teacher and writer becoming, trying to rise. I am starting again, too, in this blog—five years since my last post. In doing so, I invite you to take the first steps with me.

21st Century Symposium Update

I know I haven't posted in quite some time, but I promise it's not because I am a slacker. My mind's been elsewhere, and I've been working on other things, some of which I'll post about soon.

For now, know that 21st Century Symposium has been amazing so far, and we have a wiki. Check it out!

21st Century Symposium

I am very excited about a new project. Three colleagues and I are working (with the assistance of our wonderful principal and a great group of kids) on a new, experimental, multidisciplinary course for next year.

21st Century Symposium will be led by four core-area teachers (math, social studies, science, and me, English) and will incorporate aspects of all subject areas in a study of real-world themes and ideas that is student-driven. Kids will determine projects, grading, topics, readings, (ideally) everything. And we will learn right along with them--teachers as learner-leaders. The ultimate goal is real world understanding, participation, and publication.

We're starting with a blog. Wish us luck and follow our progress.

The Primary Race and Issues of Race in West Virginia

At this moment, facing national news coverage of the West Virginia primary elections, echoes of racism, ignorance, and prejudice sounding throughout the national media, I am saddened and afraid.

An Associated Press exit poll found that “one in five white Clinton voters said race was an important factor in their vote and about 85 percent of them voted for Clinton against Obama, who would be the first black major-party presidential nominee.” In a state that is 95 percent white, this might be expected: one can argue that it’s human nature to fear the unfamiliar. We’ve made national headlines for this. We have also made national headlines for some of our residents’ overwhelming lack of information. On Wednesday, The Daily Show openly mocked interviewees’ ignorance, and with valid reason. The ideas represented are obvious examples of what my friend Pete refers to as “ignorance with confidence:” the worst possible kind of ignorance.

So I sat in my car this morning, in the parking lot at school, listening to West Virginia Public Radio’s coverage of recent press. In their piece on West Virginia Morning, “Racial, religious prejudice hurt Obama in W.Va.,” Scott Finn and Anna Sale presented the issues frankly and clearly, and I watched the rain and felt a stone of hopelessness growing in the pit of my stomach. I listened to interviews with the state Democratic and Republican chairmen, and cringed as they expressed the idea that West Virginians aren’t really racist; that if a person were to ask the question directly, West Virginians would deny being racist—the interviews just came off incorrectly. This made me feel even worse, simply because that thinking—the direct question of prejudice versus the ingrained and slippery submerged reality—obscures and oversimplifies the problem. It’s the same when people say: “I’m not racist, I have a Black friend,” yet still exhibit prejudiced behavior. Kids do this all the time: “I’m not racist, I just wouldn’t trust “a Mexican”… or “a Jew”… or “an Arab.” Fill in the blank. It’s frustrating and frightening, the lack of logical thinking: again, ignorance with confidence. I see it when I teach a Holocaust unit and kids express sympathy with the Jews, yet prejudice against African Americans… When I show Hotel Rwanda, and they voice the opinion that those Africans are different from Blacks here… And I’ll not even discuss the stereotypes that so many hold about West Virginia, which now seem to smack of some truth! People exhibit a strange inability to translate thinking across barriers, to see how hate is hate, no matter where and how or why it rears its ugly head. And that hate is destructive, always.

As a teacher, I think it’s my responsibility not so much to teach what’s “right” (too subjective and close to indoctrination for me) but to teach kids how to logically evaluate all the information they’re given, and how to seek more information when a logical solution is evasive. I’ve written about this before, but it’s critical in a discussion of prejudice because hate is clearly illogical. Like the woman on The Daily Show who stated she wouldn’t vote for Obama because she’s “…had enough of Hussein,” we don’t always have the ability to distinguish between distortions and facts. A shared name does not equal shared beliefs; why isn’t this obvious? What if his name were Adolf? Maybe it’s the result of culturally faulty synapses, but, according to current media evidence, we’re just not making logical connections in West Virginia.

It’s distressing and daunting. It’s another task to add to the list of things that I must do as a teacher. It’s culturally ingrained and deeply concealed, and it takes a national political issue to reveal it. When I discussed it with my class this morning, their thinking was that only the most outrageous, most controversial interviews were excerpted on the news, and that only a small cross section of voters must have been polled. But this is oversimplifying, as well. And maybe it is true, too, that press coverage is biased, but again, it doesn’t account for the fact that hate is here, it’s our problem, and we’ve gotten very good at avoiding actually dealing with it.

My rainy parking lot moment, listening to the radio, my sadness at the already poor national image of West Virginians, my responsibility as an educator—all these lead me to the same place. I have got to turn that stone of hopelessness into a grain of hope. I am only one, but I hope I make a difference. I hope the kids who leave my classes can see logical patterns, and communicate those to others. I hope my kids won’t embody and reinforce those awful stereotypes about West Virginians; they can change them by not stereotyping other people. I hope for the future, because, even with all the progress we’ve made nationally, the West Virginian present just isn’t good enough. Ignorance with confidence? Not in my classroom.

Signposts

I can hardly believe it's almost over. I feel relief, some sadness, and some excitement to really be a teacher again. This is the text of my speech from the 2008 Teacher of the Year banquet, at which I turned over my "crown."

When I addressed the guests at this banquet last year, I was in a considerable amount of shock. In fact, if I had known I would be selected, I probably would have not filled out the application, nor would I have agreed to attend the finalist interview in the first place. The truth is this: when I attended this banquet last year, I had seriously been considering whether I was on the right path. In my heart, I did not really believe I was a good teacher. I did not expect to be selected. I did not know that something would happen to hold me in my classroom. Now, I think it happened for a reason.

It could be that I am a superstitious person. I do look for extraordinary messages in everyday events; I am an English teacher, after all. But I believe there are paths we are meant to follow, and we don’t always get to choose them ourselves.

On September 12, 2006, I drove the hundred miles from my home in Morgan County to my parent’s home in Morgantown. The whole time I was laboring over the silliest thing: not the speech I had written, not whether my students would actually work for my substitute, but what jewelry I would wear to the banquet. It does seem silly, doesn’t it? Let me explain. When I was a teenager, my grandmother gave me a necklace--she called it a lavaliere--that had been given to her by a student in her first year of teaching: 1929. It was cheap, five and dime costume jewelry, but she knew that the child who had given it to her had probably not been able to afford it. It was a testament to the relationships she built in her classroom. This seemed an obvious choice for me to wear to this dinner, but I also saw it as a sign of commitment to a career about which I was having serious doubts.

The second jewelry choice was a gift from a friend who was aware of my conflict. It’s a raw stone set with a simple silver wire wrapping. The stone is called chrysoprase, and it’s a “heart stone,” which signifies the power of the heart over all others. It is representative of finding success in following new paths. Again, facing professional uncertainty, this seemed an obvious choice, but a polar opposite to the first.

It was with this conundrum that I drove the two hours to my parents’ home. I brought both necklaces and intended to ask my folks for help in making the decision. To me, these represented two clear and contrasting paths, neither of which I was sure I wanted. So I arrived, and I took both pieces in the house, and I asked the question. My parents, who had incidentally just returned from Alaska, responded by making the decision easy. They presented me with a gift—a third necklace, the one I am wearing now, and the one I wore to this banquet last year. It is a jade carving, in miniature, of an Inuit symbol, called an inushuk: these are signposts, used to mark dogsled trails. Travelers use these signs to find their paths and to stick to them. "So you don't lose your way," my mom said. And as a result of the events at this banquet last year, I did find my way—in so many ways.

Fate toys with us, I think. Being a teacher is hard, and being an award-winning teacher is even harder. It has been a test of my talents, my constitution, my teaching techniques, and my convictions in the deepest sense of myself. Standing here, last year, there were some things I needed to know that I ended up figuring out mostly on my own, so, for the 2008 West Virginia Teacher of the Year, these are some things I need to tell you:

You will hone skills and talents you never knew you had: for example, you will become an expert at winging a speech, churning out thank you cards, throwing together substitute plans, and getting by on very little sleep. You may gain other skills: you may move audiences to tears, you may find you are very skilled at moving yourself in 1/6^th gravity at Space Camp, you may learn to be photogenic for the first time in your life. You will learn to ask for—and accept—help from unexpected sources.

You will face disappointments: when you tell your students you’ll be out for the 20^th time this semester, they may look at you with frustration and say: “We Hate This.” Your significant other may wonder who you are. You may see a drop in student test scores for the first time in your career. You may ask for help and not receive it from sources you most expect to give it.

You must rely on all your resources: Dave Perine, Liza Cordiero, Jason Hughes, and Alison Barker will be of immense help to you, as they were to me. I am a resource for you, too. You will meet fifty-five other amazing teachers of the year who will awe you with their talents, caring, and devotion to our profession; you may be stunned to realize that you are one of them. You are one of them.

You will find that most of what you do will be up to you: your best resource will be yourself; you have to trust in your own abilities to find your way. There may be moments when you find yourself stretched so thin that you feel you can’t do anything well, but you will do well—you will shine.

I wish you luck on your journey; I’m ready to go home.

Know this: It will be Hard. You will feel undeserving and discouraged.

It will change you. You will be a better teacher.

It will be whatever you make it.

It will be worth it.

And when you find yourself waffling between frustration and fortitude, between dedication and destruction, remember this:

Your path has found you.

Now it’s up to you to see the signposts.